Fw: [PROPOSAL] To retire autoconf for 4.1

Jelmer Vernooij jelmer at samba.org
Fri May 24 07:07:33 MDT 2013


On Fri, May 24, 2013 at 08:30:10AM -0400, Simo wrote:
> On 05/24/2013 07:58 AM, yaberger at ca.ibm.com wrote:
> >http://wiki.python.org/moin/Python2orPython3
> >
> >I believe you're right, ie: when most major distributions will provide a
> >Python 3.x package in their repositories, Samba team should start working
> >on moving from Python 2.x to 3.x for Samba and Waf.
> >RHEL 6.4 is on 2.6.6
> >Debian 7 is on 2.7.3 but also have a package for Python 3.2.3
> 
> At SambaXP I and Alexander started raising a concern about this.
> Fedora is starting to plan to move to Python 3, so we need to start
> thinking about moving samba as well.
When will Fedora drop support for Python 2.x? Just having the default changed
shouldn't be a problem, so long as Python2.x is still installable.

> Unfortunately we cannot just make a full switch. Because there are
> distributions that will stay on Python 2.x for a long time, much
> longer than Fedora's support for Python 2.x presumably.
> 
> So we should really look into what it will take to try to support
> both 2.x and 3.x especially for generated bindings as the binding
> interface, I am told, changes quite some fundamental things.
> 
> A flag day where we switch fro 2 to 3 is highly unfeasible unless we
> also decide to drop support for all Enterprise Linux distributions
> and all other long term maintenance Unix flavors at the same time. I
> do not think that would be a wise choice.
I've tried to do support for both python2 and python3 with a few projects. It
requires ugly hacks that make the code less readable, is a major pain to keep
up and prone to regressions even for smaller projects. It would be
a nightmare for a project the size of Samba.

What are the long term releases we should be worried about a year from now that
don't support Python3 yet? Debian oldstable and stable both have Python3, and
all LTS releases of Ubuntu that are still supported also have a version of
Python3.

Cheers,

Jelmer


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